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The latest word on the iPhone is that the 4.0 OS will finally have
honest-to-goodness multitasking. This could hopefully lead to things like a real chat client, and dangerous battery consumption. I still hope it's true.

High-C writes "With apologies to Futuristic Sex Robotz, the future is here, and her name is Roxxxy. Truecompanion.com has revealed their answer to the Real Doll, and it looks nice. The site is short on details, pictures, pricing info, but wow." NOTE: some of the above links are not work-safe, for many values of work. I stopped by this exhibit today at the AVN Expo (not officially a part of CES, but by curious coincidence scheduled to coincide; the old saw that porn drives tech isn't without merit). Roxxxy, though, was rather unsexily posed on a couch, not moving a bit — downright creepy, in fact.

The iPhone didn't sell well initially for a couple of reasons. Most individuals didn't think they needed smart phones. Most smart phone users didn't think the iPhone was a real smart phone. It took a while for people to realize the potential of the app store, and what the iPhone could do for them.

Sure, and then there's the fact that the iPhone didn't originally have a reasonable subsidy, meaning people had to pay a much higher price than they were used to paying for a subsidized phone. Oh, and the fact that the app store wasn't released until a year later with software 2.0.

Palm [is] just being lazy, because they don't want to have to write and support their own sync code.

Well, by that logic, it could be argued that Apple is being lazy because they don't want to write and support full-featured APIs which can provide a comparable syncing experience to that of an iPod. It could also be argued that Apple deliberately does so, in an effort to coerce buyers into purchasing the iPod because of the better experience. Of course, it would be difficult to put Apple at fault for such action, as iTunes is their own program with which they are free to code as they like - unless, of course, iTunes manages to dominate market share (which I don't think it has, but I'm not sure), in which case they would possess a monopoly of the Music Player and Portable Music Device Syncing software market, and could be at fault for an anti-trust case or unfair competition.
But all that really matters at this point is which company has more money.

theodp writes "Evil is in the eye of the beholder, but there's certainly not much to like in the newly-disclosed Apple patent applications for Systems and Methods for Provisioning Computing Devices. Provisioning, says Apple, allows carriers to 'specify access limitations to certain device resources which may otherwise be available to users of the device.' So what problem are we trying to solve here? 'Mobile devices often have capabilities that the carriers do not want utilized on their networks,' explains Apple. 'Various applications on these devices may also need to be restricted.'"

How about distributing the 25GB image accross 10 MLC SSD drives in a RAID 0 configuration and connecting them all to the computer via SATAII into a SAS card with 3 SAS-4xSATA adapters. With 10 drives, each distributed piece would be 2.5 GB, which should take about 12.5 seconds to transfer if each drive has a transfer speed of around 200MBps, followed by whatever amount of processing time was needed for the file to be rebuilt. It may be cumbersome and require a thick bundle of cables, but it is possible.
Here's a similar experiment:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs

You do realize spdif is only a protocal and exists in multiple forms, including optical as well as coaxial (there are even rare forms that use BNC or XLR, similar to SMPTE) , and only accounts for 2 data streams (generally audio). If you were going down that path the least you could have said is ADAT - at least that accounts for 8 streams instead of 2.

Correction: You suck at iPhone games. Just because you are too lazy to learn a new control scheme and therefore fail at every attempt to play one of these games doesn't mean that they suck - it means that you suck at playing them.